Businesses and individuals rely on legally executed documents in a variety of contexts, from completion of complex forms used by governments and institutions (e.g., insurance forms, car loan and purchase forms, and the like), to simple contracts between individuals (e.g., lease agreements, wills, and a host of miscellaneous arrangements), with a range of contracts in between.
Documents signed by overnight envelope take a minimum of one day to reach the recipient and an additional day to be returned. Due to intra-office distribution delays and recipients' tendency to put paper documents in to-do piles, the average cycle time using overnight envelopes is 5-7 days. Documents signed by fax have an average cycle time of 2-3 days, due to intra-office delays, procrastination of paper document tasks, and fax machine mishaps. Faced with the burden of signing a paper document and returning it by fax, scan, or mail, many recipients put it down on their desk and forget about it.
While simply typing the signer's name fulfills the legal requirement for an online agreement, users find a “real” signature more assuring, and often third parties only accept documents signed by what appears to be a “real” signature, i.e., one that looks as though an individual put pen-to-paper to apply a personal signature. For online document signing, the presence of a handmade mark provides an extra level of authentication.
For complex forms, there often are several fields within the form that require a signer to either initial, complete information (e.g., name, address, and other personal information), and sign. It also is possible that a single form or document may require action by more than one signer. For example, in an insurance claim form, it is possible that the claimant may be required to complete information in some fields of the document, while the claim adjuster must complete other fields in the same document. Ensuring that all of the multiple fields are not only completed, but completed with the correct type of information, usually involves multiple iterations, erroneous submissions, and customer support. This causes delay in the transaction and increased cost for providing customer support. One advantage of providing documents for online signature is to expedite the signing event and reduce company overhead in obtaining complete documents for processing. Thus, there remains a need for a system and method for enabling a document creator to effectively electronically obtain execution of complex documents, having multiple information fields potentially requiring multiple and various types of information, to multiple signers.